"Confidence was gone": Lewis Hamilton puzzled by…

"Confidence was gone": Lewis Hamilton puzzled by Ferrari's loss of speed in Monaco GP qualifying

After Ferrari demonstrated great speed in practice, the Italian team found itself on the back foot in the battle for Formula 1 pole at the Monaco Grand Prix - and Lewis Hamilton said his car was "completely different" from Friday to Saturday.

Ferrari resisted the urge to make too many changes overnight after headlining both FP1 and FP2, since the balance of the SF-26 was in a good place at the end of the Friday sessions, but Hamilton felt that he was lacking confidence in the rear end of the car by the start of qualifying.

The team reduced the front wing flap angle through the session to balance the car out, bringing Hamilton into a happier place by the start of Q3, but he was surprised by the increases in performance that Mercedes and Red Bull had uncovered overnight - Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen locked out the front row of the grid with their final laps of the session.

Hamilton was unsure why the car's balance had swung so much, and admitted that he confidence in the car "was completely gone" at the start of qualifying before the team reduced the downforce level at the front end.

"I don't think we went the wrong way with set-up, that's the thing," Hamilton explained. "I think it was the tiniest tweaks, like a millimetre here, a millimetre there, so tiniest tweaks.

"But we really need to look into what switched because the car was completely different to what it was before and I didn't have any rear end for some reason. I'd had a good balance most of the weekend.

"I do think with the pace that we had yesterday I think we could have been closer, but you know these guys really started putting out some amazing times at the end, so fair play to them. We'll push hard tomorrow, hopefully we can keep up and who knows maybe we could have a really good start.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari (Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images)

"I really don't know [what changed], I think for us, apart from like wanting more downforce globally, I think when we arrived on Thursday we saw other people with those trick additions to their wing, we didn't have that which was a little bit of a surprise.

"But as I said our pace was looking good, in general to go quicker we needed more front end. But we got to qualifying, I had a lot of front end and I had to take out like 10 holes of front wing for some reason. Once we took that out, the car was a little bit more reasonable by my last lap in Q3, but I needed that balance to start in Q1 and then build upon that.

"It's all about confidence. I didn't have it, it was completely gone in Q1 and then I was trying to pull back what I could."

Regardless, Hamilton was reasonably pleased with his third-place finish in qualifying, although felt that Ferrari deserved to break Mercedes' current stranglehold over pole position this year.

He reiterated his stance that he was in a "really good place" with Ferrari, and promised that he would "hassle" Antonelli and Verstappen as much as possible to contend for victory.

"I think relatively I'm relatively happy with P3, obviously P1 is what I already wanted and I really felt like the team deserved to finally get it, but I felt capable," he added.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari (Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images)

"I'm in a really good place with the car, I'm in a really good place with the team and you can see that I have decent pace still in me, there's no lacking of pace which I'm really grateful and happy about, regardless of all the negative comments people have made over the times. It's good; I just keep on putting the work in and I'll keep showing up and I'll keep delivering.

"You know how these races go, it's very difficult [to overtake]. I hope that we can get a really good start and maybe apply some pressure to the two and we need rain probably.

"But nothing's impossible if you keep the applying the pressure, it's going to be very hard to beat these two, you've got two great drivers who are in quick cars and have been very quick all weekend.

"It's a shame this race is generally often such a procession and in the sense of just that we're just often following each other and the car is always overheating, brakes always overheating, just with the way the track is and obviously we only have really one stop, because the tyres are so hard and often go so far.

"But I'm going to still give it absolutely everything and try and hassle them as much as I can and try and force them into not making certain corners."